Re:A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition
by Gravityloss on Thursday June 11, 2020 @04:56AM
(#23486626)
Yes, I think in the modern world with these methods and massive data sets being used in law enforcement, medical sector etc, the people working there should undergo a lot of training about how basic Bayesian inference works etc. We are otherwise in a world of hurt. Healthy people being told they have some really serious rare diseases, maybe even starting treatment, innocent people being prosecuted or killed during raids etc.
Re:A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition
by d6e on Thursday June 11, 2020 @05:22AM
(#23486804)
Yeah... training almost assuredly won't happen sadly. Especially for cops.
Re:A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition
by avs733 on Friday June 12, 2020 @08:26AM
(#23498526)
I teach this stuff (biomedical engineering statistics) to undergrads.
The hardest thing for them with probability is false positives. conceptually it does not seem to align well with how the human brain works. I've had students literally get so frustrated the cry because they know what the math says but can't accept that you can test positive for a disease and not have it. They know they are wrong but it's just this weird sticky misconception.
If I increase the population I test to include any warm body, eventually I'll end up with more false positives than real positives.
If you are looking for one male suspect and comparing them to all the male faces (let's assume it gets gender correct) in the us, with a 99.9999% (six 9s) accurate algorithm you would get something like:
1 true positive 182,499,818 true negatives 182 false positives
Broad scale facial recognition is just an outright stupid thing to do as a sole measure of identification without the use of other information.